In my opinion - Concur is THE WAY to go
November 14, 2019
In my opinion - Concur is THE WAY to go
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Concur Travel and Expense
Concur Travel and Expense is used by all team members to reimburse expenses - both on our corporate credit card and to employees for out-of-pocket expenses - and to book travel. This software is available both through the internet and on mobile devices which works very well for our workforce. We use their reporting services to help monitor compliance. We use their Detect product to help with auditing and ExpenseIt for mobile receipt capture.
- Their ExpenseIt uses AI to read and capture receipts very well.
- Their support team is very responsive to issues.
- They are always looking for ways to partner with new companies and to embrace new technologies that can enhance the user's experience.
- Some areas of the software are hard to find / access. For instance, a user has the opportunity to enroll in electronic receipts from participating vendors. Should the employee forget to enroll, it's very hard to find where that can be enabled in the future.
- ExpenseIT does a decent job of dealing with itemized receipts for things like hotels. However, if the employee loads a receipt through direct PDF, there is no AI assistance and they often struggle with itemizing the details in the software.
- We permit negative dollar expense reports to process against our credit card batch. When the bank returns an acknowledgement that the report was credited, Concur cannot auto hide these transactions and users will often repay credits that we have taken.
- The canned report showing personally owed expenses pulls in the total amount of the charge, not the actual amount personally owed. If you're not aware of this, you may end up reporting an inflated amount of money owed by employees and try to extract from them the wrong amount as well.
- If you sign a contract with them for new services, they will begin charging you on the next quarter date - even if the product hasn't been implemented.
- We've had substantial gains in productivity in auditing. We saved 1 FTE by enabling certain audit rules in the software and moving to a sample audit instead of a 100% receipt audit. We estimate this savings at $90k annually. We saved an additional 1/2 FTE when we implemented Detect. It uses AI to read and audit all receipts and reports. So we now do 100% review for $150k less per year.
- We were able to incorporate a Corporate Credit Card program for all of our employees, which earns us an annual rebate of $200k.
- Using mobile capture for receipt images saves us an average of 5 minutes per expense report. Since we submit over 12,000 reports annually, we estimate this saves us about $50k per year.
- Through partnership apps like Uber and Lyft, we estimate we save about $20k annually from the cost of traditional transportation methods.
Divvy, while working in a similar space doesn't work well for larger enterprise roll out. Divvy requires a very hands on approach from manager to employee - for instance, each Divvy card limit is set by the manager. The employee can request an increase on the fly if they need it and the manager can approve the increase. However, with the volume of business and spending we conduct, managers wouldn't be able to "manage" this level of data and would likely opt for really high credit limits with limited oversight. Since this is the case for us, having a corporate credit card program with set limits and rules enabled in Concur is much more functional.
We use SAP for ERP and this is integrated with Concur. Each night, we send up a listing of our active employees along with our active projects and ledger codes. Each morning we pull down the approved costs and import them into our General Ledger. Managing things through this manner of data exchange saves a lot of manual intervention and management.
The audit rules in place in the software make it very easy for our employees to book compliant travel through the web. The interface looks a lot like other travel sites - like Expedia - showing rates, amenities and photos. However should the employee attempt to book something that might be prohibited - like a resort, we can stop the booking. In other instances, we can collect data to see why the employee may be booking outside of policy - for instance choosing Business Class instead of economy. We can add content to Concur from a partner site - Booking.com - that will enable employees to book from smaller properties that may not participate with GDS. We've also been able to use the software to enable payment of our Travel Ghost cards -saving our travel admins a good deal of time.
Our users really enjoy the mobile receipt capture that saves them from carrying paper receipts along as they travel. Expenses feed into Concur nightly from ExpenseIT (the receipt capture software) and from the Credit Card feed. This allows employees to work on expense reports whenever they are ready to do so. No need to wait to receive a statement from the bank. Concur saves data from prior reports - like meal attendees and allocation data - which can greatly speed up the creation of expense reports.